me with anythin'.'
'I'm sure that's not true.'
'No?'
Catherine looked around. 'He trusts you with this.'
'Yeah? I'll tell you how much he trusts me. End of the day, weekend, say, I've been workin' here, he'll come in, ask if I've cashed up, and when I say yeah an' tell him what it is, the total, right, he opens the cash desk, this in front of me, right in front of my mates, shamin' me, and counts it all again himself, every one fuckin' p. And you think he's gonna tell me where he is when he don't want no one to know?'
'I'm sorry,' Catherine said.
Marcus gave her a hard stare. 'What you got to be sorry about?'
Early evening, Karen went to the pub with Michaelson and a few more of the team, stood a round, left some money behind the bar, and set off with Mike Ramsden to get something to eat. Someone had recommended an Indian restaurant close to the square, unprepossessing enough from the outside for Ramsden to compare it to the Wimpy Bars of his pimply youth. 'Fat plastic tomatoes full of dodgy sauce on all the tables, you'll see.'
Thankfully, he was wrong in just about every respect.
True, the setting was plain, the walls largely unadorned, no fuss or furbelows, the service without pretension, but the food… the food, they both agreed, was excellent.
Ramsden waved a popadom. 'Best Indian since I was last down Brick Lane.'
She eyed him sceptically. 'When were you ever down Brick Lane?'
Ramsden grinned. 'You don't know, do you? The kind of cosmopolitan life I lead. Hobnobbing with our Muslim brothers.'
Sometimes, when he and Karen were together, he would adopt the tones and prejudices of a dyed-in-the- wool Cockney oik. It was a tricky line to tread, and there had been times, one or two, when he had veered dangerously close to overstepping the mark.
'Shut up,' Karen said, 'and pass me the spinach.'
Earlier in the day, Ramsden had joined Frank Michaelson in reinterviewing the taxi driver who had driven Lynn Kellogg home from the station.
There had been no one else on the street when he had dropped Lynn Kellogg off; he was certain of that. No one outside the house. As soon as she was out of the cab he'd driven off. A fare waiting, Mapperley Plains.
'Time's money,' he said. 'You know what I mean?'
'What about the shots?' Ramsden had asked. 'Two shots, close together. Surely you'd heard those?'
The cabdriver shook his head. 'If I did, I thought it was a car backfiring. Didn't give it any mind.'
Pressed, he confirmed there had been a car parked down on the right, dark, he thought. Dark blue or black. Sierra? So many cars nowadays, they all look the same. But he thought it was a Sierra.
'You think?' Ramsden had pushed him. 'You think or you're sure?'
'It was dark.'
'I know. We know.'
'I couldn't swear to it.'
'You don't have to swear. All you have to do is be certain. Certain about what you saw.'
'All right, then, it was a Sierra.'
'You're sure?'
The danger was, as Karen reminded Ramsden later, push too hard and what the witness gives you is what they think you want to hear. But, in the absence of a great deal else, they would go with the Sierra. The new number-plate-recognition software that was linked to Traffic would help them to trace any such vehicles that had been in the vicinity thirty minutes either side of the murder.
Recanvassing the neighbours had yielded little new.
The Peugeot had been struck off their list as a possible getaway car when one of the youths who'd borrowed it for a little joyriding came reluctantly forward after watching the news, anxious to clear himself of any involvement in a fatal shooting.
The partial shoe print that had been lifted had a quite distinctive studded sole-an Adidas trainer, almost certainly, the oddly named ZX 500 Animal-but knowing that and having nothing yet to match it to didn't get them very far at all.
FSS were still running tests on the bullets and cartridge cases, but the promised report had yet to arrive.
Progress was slow.
'Brent's old lady,' Ramsden asked, tearing off a piece of naan to wipe round his plate, 'that kid of hers-you believe them about not knowing where he is?'
Karen sighed. 'Who knows?'
They had tried contacting Michael Brent in London, but so far to no avail.
'But on balance?' Ramsden persevered.
'I don't know, Mike, I really don't.'
'You haven't got any contacts out there yourself?'
'Not the kind that'd be useful, no. Operation Trident, though, back in the Met, their Intelligence Section's got pretty good contacts with the Jamaican police. I can pull a couple of favours from this DS I know.'
'I'll bet.'
'Shut it!'
Ramsden laughed and raised his hands in surrender. 'Wouldn't hurt to ask if they've flagged anyone likely coming into the country round about the time of the shooting.' He winked. 'Always assuming your favours go that far.'
'Your mouth's going to get you in a lot of trouble one day.'
Ramsden winked. 'I wish.'
Treading the line, treading the line.
Karen's serviced apartment was in a converted hospital building on The Ropewalk, overlooking the centre of the city, and not much more than a five-minute walk from where she and Mike Ramsden had had dinner. Sand- coloured walls, neutral carpeting, everything just this side of pristine. In the living room there was a pair of wicker chairs that seemed, oddly, to have strayed in from a conservatory, and a two-seater settee, upholstered in black, that looked smart rather than comfortable. On a low table in front of the settee, the management had left a bottle of red wine and two glasses, the second glass in case, presumably, she struck it lucky. The bed, she was pleased to see, was a decent size and furnished with white linen; a single, deep-red cushion to match the twin lamps at either side. The bathroom was serviceable but small, the kitchen area likewise.
Karen found a corkscrew and opened the wine, an Aussie Shiraz rich enough to live with the aftertaste of her Indian meal. For some little time she stood at the window, glass in hand, looking out, letting the thoughts of the day jostle for space in her mind, the faint hum of the city pierced every now and again by the urgency of a police siren or the sound of an ambulance hurrying to an emergency. She wondered about Resnick and whether he was alone and assumed that he was, picturing him wandering heavily, lost, from room to room. She tried to imagine what it would be like to have the person you loved shot down more or less in front of your eyes and failed. What was that song Bessie Smith used to sing? Something about waking up lonely, cold in hand.
Slipping one of the CDs Resnick had lent her onto the stereo, she topped up her glass. 'Downhearted Blues.' Bessie Smith's first recording, 1923. Bessie proclaiming trouble was going to follow her to her grave.
Tell the truth, girl, Karen thought, tell the truth. Trouble from being black, trouble with love, trouble with men. Once, her mother had told her, when Bessie discovered that her husband was having an affair with one of the chorus girls who worked in her show, she beat the girl up and threw her off the train on which they'd been travelling, then went after her husband with a gun, chasing him down the tracks and taking potshots as she ran. Not that Bessie was averse to the occasional chorus girl herself.
Almost the last thought Karen had before falling asleep echoed that of Catherine Njoroge the day before: Nowhere's safe, we can reach you anywhere, even at home, where you feel safest. Nowhere's safe, Karen thought, not anymore. As her eyes closed, the night was rent by the rising wail of sirens once more.
